Echoes in the Gallery: A Collaborative Immersive Analytics System for Analyzing Audience Reactions in Virtual Reality Exhibitions

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has enriched the exhibition experience, yet curators and artists often face challenges in curation due to disagreements in the spatial arrangement of exhibits. Although VR applications permit audiences to express their reactions, these multimodal and semantically rich data remain underutilized in spatial arrangement deliberations. Based on insights from semi-structured interviews with curators and artists, we outline design requirements to enhance collaboration in analyzing visitors' reactions, focusing on traffic flow analysis, angle-induced reactions, what-if analysis, and cross-view annotations. To meet these requirements, we propose a novel collaborative immersive analytic system that visualizes audience flow and individual reactions within VR spaces, facilitating more effective communication and decision-making between artists and curators. Future research will explore advanced visual design techniques to address scalability issues and in-place spatial comparison. We will also finish the development and conduct usability studies.